PhilPapers is currently in read-only mode while we are performing some maintenance. You can use the site normally except that you cannot sign in. This shouldn't last long.
Abstract There has been a strong tendency in economic thought to try to take human wants, desires, and preferences as the basis for deciding how to act. This essay argues that ?needs? constitute a distinct category which cannot be reduced to preference. The reductive strategy is partly connected with a philosophical mistake about the relation between the subjective and the objective. The distinction between needs and wants must be central to any continuing form of human action, but it may also (...) not be understood in such a way as to posit some purely objective (perhaps biological) needs that can be specified independently of people's wishes and desires; nor can those desires be specified outside the context of an account of the various ways in which they arise out of, are embedded in, and are directed to ?objective? features of our world. (shrink)
Political judgment in its historical context -- The politics of managing decline -- Moralism and realpolitik -- On the very idea of a metaphysics of right -- The actual and another modernity : order and imagination in Don Quixote -- Culture as ideal and as boundary -- On museums -- Celan's Meridian -- Heidegger and his brother -- Richard Rorty at Princeton : personal recollections -- Melody as death -- On bourgeois philosophy and the concept of "criticism".
This book by leading international scholars in the fields of history, philosophy and politics restores the subject to a place at the very centre of political theory and practice.
"Raymond Geuss is a major voice in contemporary philosophy, and this book will enhance his stature even further. Containing some of his best pieces so far, "Outside Ethics" reveals his impressive range as well as the depth of his thought.
The British Prime Minister Tony Blair has appealed to the other members of the European Union to engage constructively with the Bush administration as a means of working towards peace in a perilous world. The combination of highly developed destructive capacity, relative economic decline, diplomatic incompetence, and continuing political divisions among a frustrated and resentful population that is deeply ignorant of the wider world and subject to recurrent bouts of collective paranoia does indeed make the United States a dangerous international (...) agent. One of the main ways, in particular, in which the U.S. represents a particular menace to world peace at the moment is that it has come to be in Washington's short-term interest to make the world a place in which the quick recourse to violence, and the constant threat of violence, is accepted as part of normal practice in international relations. The use of military power presents itself as an increasingly attractive option primarily because the U.S. is becoming weaker and weaker economically and politically, and force is one of the few means U.S. politicians can deploy that offer any hope whatever of allowing them to advance or protect what they think are their vital interests. (shrink)
This volume examines the ways in which the authors of the early Frankfurt School criticized, adopted and modified traditional forms of religious thought and practice. Focusing on the works of Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Otto Kirchheimer and Franz Neumann, it analyzes the relevance of religious traditions and of the Enlightenment critique of religion for modern conceptions of emancipatory thought, art, law, and politics.
This is a profound and concise essay on the basic structure of contemporary politics, written throughout in a voice that is sceptical, engaged, and clear.
"--Daniel Brudney, University of Chicago "The fund of information Geuss brings into his discussion of the ancients, and the verve and charm with which it is all presented, make the central chapters of this book particularly engaging.
Raymond Geuss has been a distinctive contributor to the analysis and evaluation of German philosophy and to recent debates in ethics. In this new collection he treats a variety of topics in ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of history with special reference to the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Adorno. Two of the essays in the volume deal with central aspects of the philosophy of Nietzsche. The collection also contains an essay on the history of conceptions of 'culture' and one (...) on the ethics of Ernst Tugendhat. The remaining three essays focus on questions in aesthetics. The volume will be of interest to students of modern philosophy, German intellectual and cultural history, and literary theory. (shrink)
Its first paradigms are in the writings of Marx and Freud. In this book Raymond Geuss sets out these fundamental claims and asks whether they can be made good.
